The International Music Summit Business Report 2018 shows the global electronic music business took a 2% drop in 2017, fueled mainly by a dip in record sales, but added that the change does not necessarily mean EDM business is down.
In fact, the opposite may be true. Global EDM business measured at $7.3 billion last year compared with $7.4 billion in 2016. The IMS report stated the $1 million difference can be attributed to many EDM tracks now being classified as pop and R&B as EDM shifts away from its underground status, according to Billboard. The IMS noted that a Nielsen study found that a large portion of Asia Pacific listens to dance music, that the EDM playlist of Spotify is the company’s sixth most popular and download sales of EDM retailer Beatport grew by more than 7 percent.
It’s “Punctured”
However, International Music Summit co-founder Pete Tong told Music Week that the EDM bubble has “punctured.” In the early 2010s, EDM grew 60 percent within three years but has slowed to about 3 percent growth, according to the 2017 report. Tong spoke ahead of the 2018 report being presented to IMS delegates.
“Funnily enough [booking agent] Marc Geiger from WME made a presentation at the IMS maybe four years ago, right at the peak of the EDM explosion story,” Tong told MusicWeek.”The numbers were off the charts when we had the financial report at the start of the session. But Marc got up there and painted it, not so much as a doomsday, but it was like, ‘This is what’s now going to happen to you guys. This is hip-hop 10 years before, this is what happens when you get to this position.’
“Everything he said in that speech pretty much turned out to be true, which was that the bubble kind of punctured. I wouldn’t say it quite burst, but it punctured. I guess another analogy would be, ‘The party’s over, it’s now time to really get your hands dirty, get back to work and look after this business you’ve built for this level and get it to the next phase’. And that’s what’s been going on in the last three or four years.”
photo: Insomniac Events (edclasvegas.com) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
